Quentin Tarantino Discusses Reviving Black Soldier Revenge Film

In a new interview, Tarantino says he could make a new film that would feature black soldiers fighting back against mistreatment in the U.S. Army.

It took Quentin Tarantino until his second revisionist historical film, Django Unchained, to tweak the oppression of black Americans, but it's a revenge plan he's long had in the works.

In Tarantino's first historical rewrite, Inglourious Basterds, he set a unit of Jewish soldiers off to kill Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. As he discusses in a new interview with TheRoot.com, the final film was just a fraction of what he had intended initially to be a miniseries. Now, the remaining parts of the original project could make for a whole new movie.

"My original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this [would be] a huge story that included the [smaller] story that you saw in the film but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been f---ed over by the American military and kind of go apeshit," Tarantino explains. "They basically -- the way Lt. Aldo Raines [Brad Pitt] and the Basterds are having an 'Apache resistance' -- [the] black troops go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland."

The writer-director says he still has the material, which is enough to make half a film. The movie, which still could happen, would be set in 1944, after the Allied invasion of Normandy, and be tentatively titled Killer Crow.

While the unit of Jewish soldiers in Inglourious Basterds was fictional (though the Brits did have an official "Jewish Brigade"), the U.S. Army did have segregated units for black soldiers; in 1948, President Truman signed an order desegregating the armed forces. Spike Lee, who denounced Tarantino's slave-era Django Unchained as "disrespectful," made a film about black World War II soldiers in 2008 called Miracle at St. Anna.